Review: Carved in Blood, by Michael Bennett

Carved in Blood: an instant front-runner for the year's most dramatic title. It's the third of Kiwi author Michael Bennett's crime trilogy, featuring Detective Hana Westerman. Make that retired detective – temporarily, at any rate. As we start, she's left the force, is working in little Tata Bay on a training programme to help young locals get their driver's licences, and having the odd face-to-fin contact with a mako shark. Daughter Addison is buoyant and busy. Dad has gone online and got himself a girlfriend. A family reunion is planned and a marriage seems imminent. Matariki is near; life seems bright under the winter sun.

Which of course means it won't stay that way. Back in the city, a steel-grey Toyota Corolla pulls up outside a liquor store, and lives are wrenched violently askew. 

But the crime seems straightforward. A young guy's cellphone is found in the Corolla. He's well-known as a courier of illegal substances, so a manhunt starts, But then there's a body, which brings a dramatically different direction with intimations of a sinister presence and brooding, long-planned revenge.

I've gone into this much detail to make the point that Bennett has built another hurtling plot that's crammed with surprises. The Gods of Fiction forbid me from including any spoilers, but I'll mention an SAS killing revisited, a Korean hitman and a K Road car ramming, a storage unit plus a phone with some old photos that bring revelations, a bit of pāua smuggling, a climax and denouement that find room for fire, water and sky. 

The hectic pace could become perversely monotonous, but Bennett knows how and where to place the occasional quieter moment. He also knows how to make 2 minutes and 24 seconds into a throat-clutching epic.

There's a substantial cast, adroitly handled and with some convincing multiple viewpoints and sparky inter-generational abrasion. As well as those above, we get a young man striving to break free from a gang, 'two teenagers with tatts and nose rings', the Asian Organised Crime Unit, a villain with eyes just like the mako's, and many more. Readers of the earlier books will recognise law and order's one-limbed agent.

Nimble dialogue. The odd genre cliché – one-word sentences or one-sentence paragraphs; imperfect participants with bruised pasts. Laudable and omnipresent women-power. A lot of footnotes explaining the Te Reo bits (and that grand New Zild term ''offsider''), which show what a success Bennett has been with overseas readers... and the local, stubbornly monolingual ones. 

Short, punchy chapters with matching sub-sections  and an urgent present tense keep things hurrying along. Auckland's topography is a constant, often symbolic background or foreground, while the Tata Bay community broadens and warms the narrative. 

The treatment and tribulations of Māori are a major motif. (There's a genuinely absorbing little section on Te Moko.) The focus is relevant, sincere, cogent. Dare I say it could be incorporated more into the plot and characterisation, rather than presented via the mini-homilies which sometimes bulge into the story?

Carved in Blood is always a competent, a tradesmanlike book – and I mean both those adjectives approvingly. Michael Bennett respects his genre and his readers; ensures they get the sorts of rewards and satisfactions they'll be expecting. The final pages point towards more to come. The author's many devotees will be fervently hoping so. Reviewed by David Hill